The Neurocritic

Saturday, January 28, 2017

President Trump this week repeated an assertion he made shortly after his election: that millions of ballots cast illegally by undocumented immigrants cost him the popular vote. If true, this would suggest the wholesale corruption of American democracy.

Not to worry: As far as anyone knows, the president’s assertion is akin to saying that millions of unicorns also voted illegally.

Reality has been more than a little trippy lately. Two different versions of current events are being presented to Americans: one based on the quantification of data and the historical record, and the other relying on “alternative facts”, a manufactured reality that supports the President's agenda. My last two posts have dealt with the nature of blatant lying and the difficulty of understanding one's political opponents. I've tried to frame my worries about the future in terms of the neuro/psychological influences on political behavior. After all, this is The Neurocritic and not The Politicritic. But the divide keeps getting worse and worse: the executive order banning Syrian refugees and restricting immigrants from Muslim countries, the baseless claim that millions of “illegals” voted for Clinton,1 the ugly wall and who will pay for it. White House/Breitbart Strategist Steve Bannon told the media to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while” (a violation of the First Amendment). Supporters of science are also concerned about possible censorship of the EPA, USDA,2 and National Park Service.

What a Long Strange Trip It's Been

Yesterday was the 11th anniversary of my blog. As I move forward into the 12th year, I wonder how The Neurocritic will stay relevant. Last year I wanted to revisit several posts and ask, “Was I Wrong?” I haven't done that yet. Lately, my standard critiques of cog neuro papers and DARPA projects have seemed unimportant in comparison to the cruelty of recent executive orders (and other threats). These policies are an embarrassment. Shameful. Unamerican. The US is sliding into the ill-fitting suit of an isolationist, authoritarian regime and it's frightening. We must stay engaged and fight via direct action: lobby our representatives, speak out in support of those without a voice, protest against unconstitutional changes — in defense of liberty and justice for all.

But sometimes we need a break from reality. The alternative reality tenaciously pursued by aficionados of psychedelic drugs (e.g., mind-blowing perceptual distortions, insight into a universal consciousness, entering a portal into another dimension, etc.) is vastly different, of course, than the dystopian sociopolitical construct of “alternative facts” (i.e., a web of lies).

On that note, two new papers on LSD were published this week. The first study provided insight into why LSD trips last so long (Wacker et al., 2017). LSD binds to the human 5-HT2B receptor (one in a large family of serotonin receptors) in a peculiar way that prolongs its signaling kinetics. The authors created a crystal structure of 5-HT2B bound to LSD and found an “unexpected binding configuration in the orthosteric site.”3

Close-up view of LSD and the orthosteric binding site of the receptor from: (B) the membrane, and (C) the extracellular space.

In fact, the second paper linked the “fabric of meaning” to the activation of 5-HT2A receptors (Preller et al., 2017). “Meaning” was defined as the attribution of meaning to musical excerpts that were not previously significant for the participant. This “meaningless” condition was compared to musical excerpts that had been selected as personally significant, and to neutral passages. The Swiss researchers also collected pharmacological fMRI data from the 22 volunteers, 16 of whom had never taken hallucinogens before. This was surprising to me.4

The within-subject drug conditions were: (1) Placebo pre-treatment + Placebo; (2) Placebo pre-treatment + LSD; and (3) Ketanserin pre-treatment + LSD. Ketanserin is a 5-HT2A receptor antagonist and as expected, it neutralized the subjective effects of LSD (although the authors were somewhat surprised by the magnitude of this effect).

Subjective Drug Effects

Mood Ratings

LSD also increased meaningfulness ratings for the meaningless musical passages, an effect that was reversed by ketanerin as well. This overattribution of personal relevance was accompanied by increased activation of medial and lateral frontal regions for the LSD condition, compared to ketanserin + LSD.

...the results provide evidence that this alteration in relevance attribution is related to increased activity of brain areas that are typically involved in self-referential processing and are of clinical importance in psychiatric disorders characterized by altered self-processing.

But it would be an exaggeration to say that all the implicated structures are specific for self-relevant processing, since the SMA, dACC, and vlPFC are important for motor and cognitive processes. Another key issue in fMRI studies of LSD and other psychoactive drugs is motion artifact. Three participants were excluded for excessive head movement (>3 mm) during a scan, but this criterion may be too liberal.

Nonetheless, the complete reversal of LSD's mind-blowing effects by ketanserin was fascinating. Now if we could eliminate more nefarious distortions of reality with a drug, that would really be something.

As always, thank you for reading!

Footnotes

1 “You have people that are registered who are dead, who are illegals, who are in two states. You have people registered in two states. They’re registered in a New York and a New Jersey. They vote twice,” Trump said, adding that none of the illegal votes were cast for him.

To obtain structural insights into LSD’s actions at human serotonin receptors, we crystallized an engineered 5-HT2BR construct bound to LSD by extensively modifying our previous approach (Wacker et al., 2013). We eventually obtained crystals and solved the X-ray structure of the 5-HT2BR/LSD complex to a resolution of 2.9 Å.

No substantial side effects were recorded during the study. Four participants reported transient headaches after drug effects had worn off. One participant reported transient sleep disturbances for the first two nights after drug administration. Participants were contacted again three months after the last drug administration. No further side effects were recorded.

You've applied the pressureTo have me crystalisedAnd you've got the faithThat I could bring paradiseI'll forgive and forgetBefore I'm paralyzedDo I have to keep up the paceTo keep you satisfiedThings have gotten closer to the sunAnd I've done things in small dosesSo don't think that I'm pushing you awayWhen you're the one that I've kept closest

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Nearly all American politicians lie, but few as blatantly as those affiliated with the present administration. How do they do it? Are they lacking a conscience? Do they believe their own lies? Do they start with small falsehoods, stretch the truth, reinterpret events, and finally graduate to verifiably false statements?

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said, contradicting all available data.

Crowds on the National Mall just before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 (left) and Barack Obama’s in 2009.

Photograph: Reuters.

Here are three major points from an astute analysis of why the first press conference of the Trump administration was such a bizarre sham:

1. Establishing a norm with the press: they will be told things that are obviously wrong and they will have no opportunity to ask questions. ...

2. Increasing the separation between Trump's base (1/3 of the population) from everybody else (the remaining 2/3). ...

3. Creating a sense of uncertainty about whether facts are knowable, among a certain chunk of the population... ...

Is there a “slippery slope”? The notorious academic fraudster Diederik Stapel describes his descent from respectable social psychologist to data fabricator:

After years of balancing on the outer limits, the grey became darker and darker until it was black, and I fell off the edge into the abyss. I’d been having trouble with my experiments for some time. Even with my various “grey” methods for “improving” the data, I wasn’t able to get the results the way I wanted them. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go a step further. I wanted it so badly. I wanted to belong, to be part of the action, to score.
. . .

I opened the file with the data that I had entered and changed an unexpected 2 into a 4; then, a little further along, I changed a 3 into a 5. It didn’t feel right. I looked around me nervously. The data danced in front of my eyes.
. . .

No. I clicked on “Undo Typing.” And again. I felt very alone. I didn’t want this. I’d worked so hard. I’d done everything I could and it just hadn’t quite worked out the way I’d expected. It just wasn’t quite how everyone could see that it logically had to be. I looked at the door of my office. It was still closed. I looked out the window. It was dark outside. “Redo Typing.”

Most of us never reach the abyss of Diederik Stapel or Sean Spicer. Or the average politician:

"People want their politicians to lie to them. The reason that people want their politicians to lie them is that people care about politics," said Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. "You understand that Washington is a dirty place and that lying is actually very helpful to get your policies implemented."

But we all lie to some extent. “Why yes, that outfit looks great on you” when we really mean to say, “Well, it's not the most flattering ensemble.” White lies like these are meant to spare another person's feelings, and can be considered a norm of politeness. But do small lies desensitize us to any negative feelings that may ensue, and make it easier to tell more substantial lies in the future?

In the study, the subjects viewed pictures of jars filled with pennies. The experimental set-up involved the subjects in the role of 'Advisor' and confederates in the role of 'Estimator'. The Advisors got a better and longer look at the jars and relayed their estimated count to the confederates, who in turn guessed the number of pennies in each jar. The players were told that at the end of the experiment, one trial would be randomly selected and both parties would be paid according to how accurate the Estimator had been on that trial. Then the Advisor was privately told that the final payment did not depend on accuracy, but the Estimator didn't know this.

The Advisor was also told that the incentive structure would be manipulated, but the Estimator didn't know this, either. Dishonesty about the amount of money in the jar (overestimation) could benefit the participant at the expense of their partner (self-serving/other-harming), benefit both (self-serving/other-serving), benefit the partner at the expense of the participant (self-harming/other-serving), or a baseline condition where it would benefit neither. There were 60 trials of each, in four separate blocks, to track any changes in dishonesty over time.

A total of 55 volunteers performed the task, with 25 of them participating in the fMRI portion of the study. The behavioral results were collapsed across all 55 participants and were not reported separately for the fMRI subjects. As expected, dishonesty escalated across the course of the blocks that were self-serving, to a greater extent for self-serving/other-harming (green) than for self-serving/other-serving (purple).

But in general, this wasn't an overly selfish bunch of people. The participants started at a dishonesty level of £4 when out for only themselves, compared to £12 when it benefited them as well as their partners. Altruistic dishonesty, you might say.

What about the neuroimaging results? Were there brain regions that tracked the subtle increase in dishonesty? The authors selected their regions of interest (ROI) via Neurosynth, an online meta-analytic framework based on words that appear in a huge database of articles. The search term they used was “emotion”, which is rather general now isn't it. The rationale for this choice was that (1) people show increased emotional arousal when dishonest; and (2) responses to emotional stimuli diminish with repeated presentation (variously known as habituation, repetition suppression, or adaptation).

It wasn't clear to me why the authors didn't conduct a whole-brain analysis in the first place; they treated it as an “exploratory analysis”.1And the emotion ROI was basically the amygdala.My Cousin Amygdala had an opinion about this.

"When we lie for personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie," explains senior author Dr Tali Sharot (UCL Experimental Psychology). "However, this response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls the bigger our lies become. This may lead to a 'slippery slope' where small acts of dishonesty escalate into more significant lies."

Would I Lie to You About Lie Adaptation?

But it's not that simple. Amygdala activity ≠ negative feeling. The senior author certainly knows this, since her previous work linked amygdala activity to optimism, of all things (Sharot et al., 2007). 2 The CNN report on the study had a silly eye-rolling title, but they did interview an independent expert, to their credit.

[Lisa Feldman Barrett] says focusing on the amygdala as the brain's source of emotion may be misguided.

Hand-selected, meta-analyses of brain mapping data, as opposed to results spit out by Neurosynth, she says, have shown that the amygdala is not necessarily critical for emotion.
. . .

Barrett said she also wonders if the research results would hold outside a laboratory's doors.

"They did not reward or punish for lying, whereas there is always a payoff or risk in real life," she said. "That might cause the amygdala to maintain its engagement."

All of this said, Barrett said she doesn't doubt that habituation plays a part in lying. She just isn't sure this new research, pointing to the amygdala as the source of emotion, focuses on the correct cause.

A very high-stakes real life experiment would put the most egregious public liars in a scanner during a simulated press conference or a late night bout of tweeting to see what happens when the falsehoods get more and more preposterous.

There is no such thing as “alternative facts.” Do not become desensitized to bald-faced lies.

I'm not sure how denying access to affordable health care, opposing scientific facts like global warming and the benefits of vaccines, alienating our allies, banning Muslims, building a wall, endorsing torture, and reviving nuclear proliferation are supposed to “make American great again” (as if the U.S. is a backward, put-upon, and defeated nation).

This way of thinking is alien to me. Is there anything that could change my mind about even one of these issues? What happens when you challenge an opponent's strongly held political views? Typically, he will double down and affirm his closely held beliefs even more strongly. Why?

As a general slogan, The Personal Is Political is not limited to white radical feminists of the 1960s.2 Much to the dismay of fundamentalist Christians and male white supremacists in the alt-right, their respective personal identities are also closely entwined with their political views. And in turn the “political” is based on a religious/moral/ethical mindset (or an anti-religious/amoral/unethical worldview, as the case may be).

Although Trump supporters (and privileged Liberals gnashing their teeth) would like you to believe that the term “identity politics” is divisive and limited to groups like the LGBT community, the Black Lives Matter movement, Tumblr feminists, SJWs, hard-working undocumented immigrants, and 1.6 billion Muslims who live in hundreds of different countries, they too cling to their groups' identity politics. Across the political spectrum, then, an attack on your core beliefs is taken an attack on you personally. All this arguing about politics with someone on the internet is pointless, because the opponents hold an unimaginably different worldview, or else they delight in outrage.

Appealing to an ideological opponent using an argument based on one's own moral framework is doomed to failure. To briefly generalize, conservatives value in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Liberals, on the other hand, favor fairness and reciprocity, caring, and protection from harm. Talking to the other camp in terms of your own values is ineffective. But that's what we always do anyway. According to Feinberg and Willer (2015):

(a) political advocates spontaneously make arguments grounded in their own moral values, not the values of those targeted for persuasion, and (b) political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective.

In one study, conservatives were slightly more likely to support the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) when the arguments in favor were framed in a “purity” context compared to a “fairness” context (Feinberg & Willer, 2015):

Purity. “The absence of universal healthcare in the United States practically ensures that we will have unclean, infected, and diseased Americans walking among us.”

Fairness. “In its current state healthcare in the U.S. is inherently unfair and unjust.”

The purity argument went to outrageous lengths, however:

Purity. “These diseases [of poverty] are disgusting infestations that invade the human body and leech out needed nutrients to survive. Many of these diseases have grotesque symptoms like yellowing of the skin and eyes, coughing up bloody mucus, itchy rashes, and lesions. These diseases are contagious and spread through the population infecting many, including those who are not poor.”

Other arguments included Gay Americans are Proud and Patriotic Americans (to promote conservative support for gay marriage) and The Military Provides a Fair Chance for Minorities and the Poor (to promote liberal support for military spending). Are there specific areas of the brain associated with greater (or lesser) willingness to change one's beliefs when presented with persuasive opposing evidence? This is one aim of the newly emerging field of political neuroscience.

This study examined what happened in the brain when the political views of 40 liberals were challenged (Kaplan et al., 2016). What can we learn from this fMRI study, beyond what we already know from political psychology? Jumping ahead, the major conclusions were...

The political is personal.

When political beliefs are challenged, people get emotional.

...which we already knew. And this quote from the first author strengthened my bias against the study:

“...Kaplan says a good way to make facts matter is to remind people that who they are and what they believe are two separate things.”

Identity politics be damned! Good luck with that! But then I read another quote from Kaplan:

“Political beliefs are like religious beliefs in the respect that both are part of who you are and important for the social circle to which you belong ... To consider an alternative view, you would have to consider an alternative version of yourself.”

This seemed much more insightful, so I took a closer look at the paper. From the outset, one notable limitation is that no conservatives were included in the study. The only participants were politically avid young people who identified as strong liberals. They read eight political statements and eight non-political statements they strongly agreed with (as rated in a pre-scan questionnaire). Each statement was followed by five “challenges” that presented a counter-argument. Then they rated their belief in each statement on a scale of 1 (strongly disbelieve) to 7 (strongly believe).

Political statements The U.S. should reduce its military budget. The laws regulating gun ownership in the United States should be made more restrictive. Welfare and food stamp programs offer necessary help to the poor. Nonpolitical statements Long term exposure to second-hand smoke is a significant health concern. Lowering one's consumption of foods that are high in cholesterol is a good way to prevent heart disease. People tend to feel the most trust for those who are most like them racially, culturally, economically, etc.

To be as compelling as possible, the challenges were often exaggerations or distortions of the truth. For the military budget example, one of the challenges was “Russia has nearly twice as many active nuclear weapons as the United States” (which is untrue; the number is 1,740 vs. 2,150 for the US). We can ask, is it really fair to lie to persuade someone to change their opinions? Then again, this is a mild distortion compared to some of the whoppers thrown out during the 2016 Presidential Race (and beyond).

Alas, the challenges weren't all that successful in persuading participants to change their minds about political statements. Ratings dropped by only .3, going from 6.8 to 6.5. And there was virtually no variability across subjects. Belief strength in non-political statements showed greater flexibility, dropping by 1.3 (with slightly more variability across subjects). This becomes important when we look at the brain-behavior correlations below.

For the fMRI data, three task periods were modeled (Statement, Challenge, and Rating) and compared for political vs. non-political trials. Activation maps were reported for the Challenge phase (Fig. 2 below). However, the statistical analysis used a cluster threshold that was overly liberal (see Cluster Failure), which raises the possibility of inflated false positive findings.3

At any rate, the authors argued that the big yellow blobs in the default mode network (precuneus, posterior cingulate, medial prefrontal cortex, inferior parietal lobe, and anterior temporal lobe) indicate that participants were accessing their self-identity during challenges to political beliefs: “Given the personal importance of political beliefs for the subjects enrolled in this study, we expected our stimuli to evoke cognition related to social identity.” But just as easily, they could have been disengaging from the task of reading the challenges (mind wandering), which is also associated with the DMN.4 Perhaps the participants found the political challenges more far-fetched than the non-political challenges.

Since it was impossible to correlate brain activity with political belief change across individuals (due to low variance), belief change in the impersonal, non-political condition was examined. But here, in contrast to the other whole-brain analyses, regions of interest (ROIs) in the amygdala and the insula were selected because of their status as “emotion” areas. The finding was that...

...participants who changed their minds more showed less BOLD signal in the insula and the amygdala when evaluating counterevidence. These results highlight the role of emotion in belief-change resistance and offer insight into the neural systems involved in belief maintenance, motivated reasoning, and related phenomena.

But this result has no direct relationship to emotional responses or belief change in the political condition, which is what some pop neuro articles claimed.

Overall, the fMRI data can be interpreted to fit a known narrative. The authors are quite correct that “the inability to change another person’s mind through evidence and argument, or to have one’s own mind changed in turn, stands out as a problem of great societal importance.” But they haven't persuaded me that neuroimaging can further our knowledge of how to go about this. Our collective well-being and survival may depend on the ability to change others' minds, now more than ever.

2 Did you know the core argument of this radical manifesto by Carol Hanisch? I didn't either. It's that women are really neat people!! How outrageous, how scandalous and offensive!

This is part of one of the most important theories we are beginning to articulate. We call it “the pro-woman line.” What it says basically is that women are really neat people. The bad things that are said about us as women are either myths (women are stupid), tactics women use to struggle individually (women are bitches), or are actually things that we want to carry into the new society and want men to share too (women are sensitive, emotional).

3 Kaplan et al. used a Z threshold of 2.3 and a cluster size probability threshold of p < 0.05. Although they used FSL FLAME1, which fared well in the Cluster Failure paper (Eklund et al., 2016), a post in the OHBM blog questioned whether this was true for task activation data:

The resting state data have a low true between-subject variance, leading to lower FWE than we might see with task data where systematic differences in task performance might indeed yield the predicted large between-subject differences. This is supported by a secondary simulation using task fMRI data with randomly assigned groups that found FLAME1 to have error rates comparable to FSL’s OLS [which were high].

About Me

Born in West Virginia in 1980, The Neurocritic embarked upon a roadtrip across America at the age of thirteen with his mother. She abandoned him when they reached San Francisco and The Neurocritic descended into a spiral of drug abuse and prostitution. At fifteen, The Neurocritic's psychiatrist encouraged him to start writing as a form of therapy.